There remain, on this matter, Childe Roland and the Flight of the Duchess.  I believe that Childe Roland emerged, all of a sudden and to Browning’s surprise, out of the pure imagination, like the Sea-born Queen; that Browning did not conceive it beforehand; that he had no intention in it, no reason for writing it, and no didactic or moral aim in it.  It was not even born of his will.  Nor does he seem to be acquainted with the old story on the subject which took a ballad form in Northern England.  The impulse to write it was suddenly awakened in him by that line out of an old song the Fool quotes in King Lear.  There is another tag of a song in Lear which stirs a host of images in the imagination; and out of which some poet might create a romantic lyric: 

    Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind.

But it does not produce so concrete a set of images as Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.  Browning has made that his own, and what he has done is almost romantic.  Almost romantic, I say, because the peculiarities of Browning’s personal genius appear too strongly in Childe Roland for pure romantic story, in which the idiosyncrasy of the poet, the personal element of his fancy, are never dominant.  The scenery, the images, the conduct of the tales of romance, are, on account of their long passage through the popular mind, impersonal.

Moreover, Browning’s poem is too much in the vague.  The romantic tales are clear in outline; this is not.  But the elements in the original story entered, as it were of their own accord, into Browning.  There are several curious, unconscious reversions to folk-lore which have crept into his work like living things which, seeing Browning engaged on a story of theirs, entered into it as into a house of their own, and without his knowledge.  The wretched cripple who points the way; the blind and wicked horse; the accursed stream; the giant mountain range, all the peaks alive, as if in a nature myth; the crowd of Roland’s predecessors turned to stone by their failure; the sudden revealing of the tower where no tower had been, might all be matched out of folk-stories.  I think I have heard that Browning wrote the poem at a breath one morning; and it reads as if, from verse to verse, he did not know what was coming to his pen.  This is very unlike his usual way; but it is very much the way in which tales of this kind are unconsciously up-built.

Men have tried to find in the poem an allegory of human life; but Browning had no allegorising intention.  However, as every story which was ever written has at its root the main elements of human nature, it is always possible to make an allegory out of any one of them.  If we like to amuse ourselves in that fashion, we may do so; but we are too bold and bad if we impute allegory to Browning. Childe Roland is nothing more than a gallop over the moorlands of imagination; and the skies of the soul, when it was made, were dark and threatening storm.  But one thing is plain in it:  it is an outcome of that passion for the mystical world, for adventure, for the unknown, which lies at the root of the romantic tree.